World’s toughest tongue twister

A tongue twister is a phrase, which are intentionally very difficult to say, as they often contain alliterative or juxtaposed sounds, so people make humorous mistakes. Famous examples include ‘red lorry yellow lorry’ and ‘she sells sea shells on the sea shore’.

Tongue twisters can be based on the ‘tones of a language’. A tone is when two different words differ in the pitch level at which a syllable is pronounced. An example of this is Mandarin Chinese has 4 different tones of the sound ‘ma’. This is the basis of the tongue twister: ‘Ma¹ma¹ qi ma³. Ma³ man. Ma¹ma¹ ma⁴ ma³.’

Tongue twisters can consist of sentences or repeated words. For example, the sentence ‘the top cop saw a cop top’ and ‘top cop top cop…’. While the first functions because of word order, the second is purely due to repetition. Both of these use the words cop and top close which causes people to mispronounce them, for example when spoken quasi- periodic timing the sound [k] continues into top, therefore producing /ktop/

However, a team at MIT have found that the tongue twister below is supposedly harder than any other.

‘Pad kid poured curd pulled cold’

In this study, very few people were able to say this sentence 10 times in a row at a fast speed. The majority of people paused or stopped talking while others began to say it incorrectly. This is because the similar groups of sounds: ‘pa’ ‘pour’ and ‘pull’, ‘ki’, ‘cu’ and ‘co’ and that each words end in ‘d’.

The reason that it may be hard to say is because it is new and people have not had chance to practice. If you practice a tongue twister enough, it is possible to ‘teach yourself’ to say it correctly and more fast. However, since it is incredibly unlikely that anyone has ever said this before, people are less able to say it.

Interesting, the study also found that nonsensical tongue twisters were much harder to pronounce than normal sentences. As said by Dr Shattuck-Hufnagel on Radio 4’s today program:

"In a jumbled up list of words you often get people trying to say two different sounds at the beginning of the words at the same time… which very seldom happens when you are trying to say a sentence"

This could also be because people are not used to saying the phrases, however, apparently ‘it’s just not fun’. This may be because the sentence does not mean anything; the tongue twister is less catchy and not funny, or it could just be too hard to be fun!

The same research group are going to continue their research by looking at the tongue position and so how these tongue twisters are articulated. We will have to wait to see whether they release any conclusive scientific evidence about tongue twisters, however, in the meant time, get practicing this tongue twister because:

'If anyone can say this 10 times quickly, they get a prize'